#say economists

[iwan1979]

Weaker exports amid lacklustre external demand and a limited boost from China’s reopening are among the uncertainties ahead for Singapore's economy, according to private-sector economists.

[communistkenobi]

It’s so funny reading any overview of American economics scholarship because all of them are like “yeah all their base assumptions are wrong and none of what they describe about the economy or labour market is true”

[nordfjording]

+ this isnt about american politics specifically as we're seeing the same thing over here but people saying they'll vote conservative because for the last 4yrs the economy has been tough like gosh. darn. wonder why that might be. bet it couldn't have anything to do with the veritable conveyor belt of Shitty Shit Happening Internationally for the last few years no certainly it all hinges on whoever whichever nation has sitting in the big chair atm. and im sure it wouldve been tons better if that person represented the side that very clearly says they don't give a flying fuck about keeping people's heads above water.

[quasi-normalcy]

Being on Tumblr really does make you forget how much of an extremist you are vis a vis the rest of the population. Case in point, yesterday someone I was having dinner with told me that they liked to read the National Post *AND* the Globe and Mail so that they could get "both sides of the story"

[sunnyperkins]

SUNNY - 1X05 : Joey Sakamoto on Apple TV+

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

I will be curious to read the vituperative denials of the validity of this article's analysis, which is pasted below the cutoff:

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” That question, first posed by Ronald Reagan in a 1980 presidential-campaign debate with Jimmy Carter, has become the quintessential political question about the economy. And most Americans today, it seems, would say their answer is no. In a new survey by Bankrate published on Wednesday, only 21 percent of those surveyed said their financial situation had improved since Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, against 50 percent who said it had gotten worse. That echoed the results of an ABC News/Washington Post poll from September, in which 44 percent of those surveyed said they were worse off financially since Biden’s election. And in a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week, 53 percent of registered voters said that Biden’s policies had hurt them personally.

As has been much commented on (including by me), this gloom is striking when contrasted with the actual performance of the U.S. economy, which grew at an annual rate of 4.9 percent in the most recent quarter, and which has seen unemployment holding below 4 percent for more than 18 months. But the downbeat mood is perhaps even more striking when contrasted with the picture offered by the Federal Reserve’s recently released Survey of Consumer

The survey provides an in-depth analysis of the financial condition of American households, conducted for the Fed by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Published every three years, it’s the proverbial gold standard of household research. The latest survey looked at Americans’ net worth as of mid-to-late 2022 and Americans’ income in 2021, comparing them with equivalent data from three years earlier. It found that despite the severe disruption to the economy caused by the pandemic and the recovery from it, Americans across the spectrum saw their incomes and wealth rise over the survey period.

The rise in median household net worth was the most notable improvement: It jumped by 37 percent from 2019 to 2022, rising to $192,000. (All numbers are adjusted for inflation.) Americans in every income bracket saw substantial gains, with the biggest gains registered by people in the middle and upper-middle brackets, which suggests that a slight narrowing of wealth inequality occurred during this time. In particular, Black and Latino households saw their median net worth rise faster than white households did—though the racial wealth gap is so wide that it narrowed only slightly as a result of this change.

A big driver of this increase was the rising value of people’s homes—and a higher percentage of Americans owned homes in 2022 than did in 2019. But households’ financial position improved in other ways too. The amount of money that the median household had in bank accounts and retirement accounts rose substantially. The percentage of Americans owning stocks directly (that is, not in retirement accounts) jumped by more than a third, from about 15 to 21 percent. The percentage of Americans with retirement accounts went from 50.5 to 54.3 percent, a notable improvement. And a fifth of Americans reported owning a business, the highest proportion since the survey began in its current form (in 1989).

Americans also reduced their debt loads during the pandemic. The median credit-card balance dropped by 14 percent, and the share of people with car loans fell. More significantly still, Americans’ median debt-to-asset, debt-to-income, and debt-payment-to-income ratios all fell, meaning that U.S. households had lower debt burdens, on average, in 2022 than they’d had three years earlier.

The gains in real income (in this case, measured from 2018 to 2021) were small—median household income rose 3 percent, with every income bracket seeing gains. But that was better than one might have expected, given that this period included a pandemic-induced recession and only a single year of recovery.

The picture the survey paints, then, is one of American households not only weathering the pandemic in surprisingly good shape, but ultimately also emerging from it in better financial shape than they were going in. And that, in turn, points to the effect of the U.S. policy response to the crisis: Stimulus payments, enhanced unemployment benefits, the child-care tax credit, and the moratorium on student-loan payments boosted household income and balance sheets, helping people pay down debt and increase their savings. In the process, these policies mildly narrowed inequality.

The U.S. government’s aggressive response to the pandemic, including Biden’s stimulus spending, also helped the job market recover all its pandemic-related losses—and add millions of jobs on top. The resulting tight labor market has been a huge boon to lower-wage workers. In fact, because the Fed survey’s income data end in 2021, it understates the income gains for the bottom half of the workforce, and the shrinking income inequality they’ve produced.

Hourly wages for production and nonsupervisory workers (who make up about 80 percent of the American workforce) rose 4.4 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2023, for instance, ahead of the pace of inflation. And this was not anomalous: Arindrajit Dube, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, crunched the numbers and found that real wages for that same sector of workers are not just higher than they were in 2019, but are now roughly where they would have been if we’d continued on the upward pre-pandemic trend.

The reason for this is simple: Low unemployment has translated into higher wages. As a recent working paper by Dube, David Autor, and Annie McGrew shows, the tight labor markets of the past few years have given lower-wage workers more bargaining power than in the past, leading to a compression in the wage gap between higher-paid and lower-paid workers. Of course, that gap is still immense, but the three scholars found that the wage gains for lower-paid workers have rolled back about a quarter of the rise in inequality that has occurred since the 1980s.

So what should we take away from the Survey of Consumer Finances data, and from Dube, Autor, and McGrew’s work? Not that everything is fine, but that public policy and macroeconomic management matter a lot. Enhanced unemployment benefits, the child-care tax credit, the stimulus payments—these things materially improved the lives of Americans and helped set the economy up for a strong recovery. If the policy response had been less aggressive, the U.S. economy would be in worse shape now. This is something you can see by looking at Europe, where economies are growing far more slowly and unemployment is higher, while inflation is no lower.

Key to this story is the fact that lower-wage workers in particular would be worse off, because they have been among the chief beneficiaries of the low unemployment created by the robust recovery. It’s a useful reminder that stagnant wages are not an inevitable result of American capitalism: When labor markets are tight, and employers have to compete with one another for employees, workers get paid more.

So, even allowing for the high inflation we saw in 2022, no one could really look at the U.S. economy today and say that the policy choices of the past three years made us poorer. Yet that, of course, is precisely how many Americans feel.

Although that pessimism does not bode well for Biden’s reelection prospects, the real problem with it is even more far-reaching: If voters think that policies that helped them actually hurt them, that makes it much less likely that politicians will embrace similar policies in the future. The U.S. got a lot right in its macroeconomic approach over the past three years. Too bad that voters think it got so much wrong.

[grinleysspa]

this is fucking insane??? how are you gonna mock people who recognize that Hamas is a fucking terrorist organization, then acknowledge that the hostages exist (a very low bar that so many ppl fail to meet) while also claiming that calling for the hostages to be returned is a bad thing???

[lacnunga]

I do have a question for my american followers, just bc there seems to be very conflicting information on this: do you own an electric kettle? Does kettle ownage vary wildly between different parts of america? I get if you dont drink tea but surely its better than stove boiling water for instant coffee, pasta etc?

[tobacconist]

i refuse to let the words ‘boomer’ or ‘zoomer’ into my vocabulary and neither should you. have some dignity.

[arctic-hands]

Figures. I and another SSI-receiving roommate secure an apartment that we can afford once we combine our meager resources, just in time for republicans to either shut down the government days after we move in most likely meaning we won't be paid said meager resources and be unable to pay rent, or biden capitulates to republicans and slashes or fully terminates our SSI (and SNAP/EBT and life-saving medication) and we can't afford to pay rent either way

[tomswifty-fr]

one of my favorite all-time pieces of media is this avengers parody some kids at my high school made to explain different types of unemployment for extra credit. it’s not good in any traditional sense, but it’s genuinely funny and creative. has really good dialogue and perfect comedic timing. of course there is the nostalgia factor of ‘hey i know that intersection!’ ‘hey i know where that prop came from!’ ‘hey i know how he actually got hit with that trash can lid and came to school the next day with a black eye!’ i already mentioned the dialogue but there are lines i constantly have the urge to quote but don’t because no one would recognize them. i’m not in touch with anyone involved and i don’t know what any of them are doing but oh i hope they are well

[peachyteabuck]

everyone wants to increase consumer spending to avoid the paradox of thrift but nobody wants to cancel student loans. crazy how that works.

[nobaraisalive]

do you people realize that milei an violent right wing dude who fuck his sister and speak with his dead dog may win the presidentials and i have no cope mechanism because satoru is death?

[treesah]

I know I should just get eye surgery because I’m a special baby princess who gets the most expensive contact lenses in the world (name brand, high prescription, weird astigmatism axis that’s different in each eye, daily disposables, year’s supply) and surely paying an ophthalmologist $5000 (or maybe even less??) to peel my eye like a grape for ten to twenty years of perfect vision is going to be cheaper than paying $551 (this is AFTER a $180 discount from vision insurance and a $125 discount from the manufacturer’s rebate) for contact lenses every single year for the rest of my life, plus like an extra $300-$500 every five years or so for a nice pair of backup glasses with the 1.74 high index lenses that have every sort of anti-whatever protection on them, but the idea of eye surgery gives me the major heebie-jeebies

[clamorybus]

last night the local news ran a story about how more stores like dollar tree are locking up more products behind cases to prevent shop lifting; every item shown behind the case were things like deodorant and toothbrushes

[labyrynth]

recommended tumblr post: economists are unethical and evil and we should just kill them all

me, an economist: